Sittard

A surviving chronicle from the second half of the thirteenth
century indicates that Jews had lived in Sittard and were victims
of the persecutions and pogroms that followed the bubonic plague
epidemic of 1349-13 50. For century and a half thereafter, not a
single Jew lived in Sittard.

Jews settled in Sittard again sometime early in the sixteenth
century, this due to the location of town along an important trade
route. The status of local Jews, however, remained uncertain and,
in 1597, Jews were barred from the town.

Jews are reported to have reappeared in
Sittard during the 1720's. The oldest remaining gravestones in the
Jewish cemetery on the present-day Fort Sanderbout street date from
1715 (although the ground of the cemetery was not officially
purchased by the local Jewish community until 1838). In 1725, the
city fathers of Sittard permitted local Jews to open a synagogue.
The synagogue, located in the Molenbeekstraat, remained in use
until 1853; the building was finally razed in 1963. Throughout the
eighteenth century, Jews regularly were reported to be amongst the
members of roving gangs of robbers that plagued the surroundings of
Sittard.

Under the Napoleonic rule of the Netherlands, the Jewish community
at Sittard was assigned to the jurisdiction of the Jewish
consistory at Krefeld. In 1816, as part of the redistricting of
Jewish communities in the Netherlands under the rule of King Willem
I, the Jewish community at Sittard was declared a Ringsynagoge or
regional community.

The Jewish population of Sittard increased throughout the first
half of the nineteenth century causing the community to outgrow its
synagogue in the Molenbeekstraat. A new synagogue was opened in the
Plakstraat in 1853. In 1856, the synagogue building was expanded to
include an apartment for the sexton, a ritual bath, a bakery for
Passover Matzos, and a room for study. The women's gallery of the
synagogue was expanded in 1892.

Official bodies of the Jewish community at Sittard included a
community council and directorate and a treasurer for the
collection and disbursement of donations to the Jews of Eretz
Israel. Local Jews also maintained a number of voluntary
organizations, social, religious, and cultural. During the 19th
century, the community supported a school for the Jewish poor at
which only religious subjects were taught following the
introduction of educational reform in the Netherlands in
1861.

The cemetery in Fort Sanderbout remained in use until 1869 when a
special Jewish section was opened in the local public cemetery on
the Wal. The Jewish section in the cemetery remained in use until
1889, when the Sittard community purchased another plot of land for
a new cemetery. In addition, several Jewish families from Sittard
buried their dead in a Jewish cemetery, locally referred to as the
'Jodenputje' (the "Jews' Ditch"), in the village of
Limbricht.

During the closing years of the 19th century, the
Jewish community at Sittard was plagued by a number of internal
conflicts that led to a temporarily schism. At the time, most local
Jews worked in the meat business, in the trade in cattle and
horses, and in the retail and clothing trades. The Jews of Sittard
were well-integrated into local life and even took part in annual
carnival celebrations.

Following the Nazi takeover of power in Germany in 1933, Sittard,
due to its location near the Dutch-German border, absorbed many
German-Jewish refugees.

The synagogue at Sittard was closed immediately following the
German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. The interior of the
building was plundered and vandalized over the course of the German
occupation. The synagogue's Torah scrolls, however, were hidden in
a local museum and later recovered. As elsewhere in the Netherlands
under the German occupation, Jewish children were expelled from
Sittard's public schools in September of 1941. A Jewish school was
soon opened in the town and functioned until the completion of
deportations in April of 1943. Deportation of Jews from Sittard to
the detention camps at Westerbork and Vught and on to Nazi death
camps in Poland commenced in the summer of 1942. Only a few of
Sittard's Jews managed to find hiding places and escape deportation
and death.

The Sittard synagogue was repaired soon after the liberation of the
Netherlands and was reopened in 1945. Most of the Jews who returned
to Sittard following the liberation left the town and, in 1947, the
Jewish community at Sittard was officially disbanded and the locale
placed under the jurisdiction of the Jewish community at Maastricht.
The synagogue was razed in 1953. In 1964, a Jewish cemetery was
opened in a section of the public nonsectarian cemetery Vrangendael
located on the Wehrerweg in Sittard. The other Jewish cemeteries in
the town were then cleared away and their remains re-interred at
Vrangendael.
In 1994, a memorial stone commemorating the Jews of Sittard
murdered during the Second World War was moved from the cemetery to
the municipal gardens.
In 1995 two memorial plaques were unveiled in the Molenbeekstraat
and the Plakstraat, to remember the former synagogues.

Brunssum
During the Second World War, hiding places for forty-eight Jewish
children were found in the nearby village of Brunssum. A monument
to the Jewish victims of Nazi-terror was unveiled in Brunssum in
1989.